Abstract
In this paper, we propose a prgressive image transmission technique using hierarchical pyramid data structure which is constructed based on the projection data of an image. To construct hierarchical Gaussian pyramids, we first divide an image into 4$\times$4 subblocks and generate the projection data of each block along the horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and antidiagonal directions. Among images reconstructed by backprojecting the projection data along a single direction, the one giving the minimum distortion is selected. The Gaussian pyramid is recursively generated by the proposed algorithm and the proposed Gaussian images are shown to preserve edge information well. Also, based on the projection concept a new transmission scheme of the lowest Laplacian plane is presented. Computer simulation shows that the quantitative performance of the proposed pyramid coding technique using projection concept is similar to those of the conventional methods with transmission rate reduced by 0.1 ~ 0.2 bpp and its subjective performance is shown to be better due to the edge preserving property of a projection operation.
